In it researchers compared results from: people who worked together on a project all the time; those who worked individually all the time; and those who did a some of both.

Here’s what they found (note that they use the word “collaboration” to define working together all the time, and don’t use a word to describe the group that did both – I and others define that as collaboration):

In the final group, people were allowed to interact with their colleagues only some of the time. “The intermittence allowed us to get the best of both worlds: getting lots of good solutions and, at the same time, raising the mean,” Bernstein says. That’s because — unlike in the collaboration condition, in which talented workers were immediately copied — those in the intermittent communication group had to puzzle through the task on their own at least some of the time, producing more variety. And — unlike in the solitude group, where ideas couldn’t be shared at all — even high-performers benefitted from that diversity, Bernstein says.